Hey Now, Hey Now, This Is What Dreams Are Made Of...

That’s right folks, I’m talking about Italia. It was absolutely amazing.

We breezed through Venice, spending just enough time there to fall in love with it.

Next on the list was Verona, because we wanted to visit La Casa de Giulietta.   What we did NOT want to do in Verona was get in trouble with the Italian Police…

Our first ever bus in Italy was our downfall.  We tried to buy tickets on the bus, but the machine was broken.  We kept trying to pay, but it kept shooting our money back at us.  We alerted the bus driver to the problem, and tried to pay him, but he waved it away and motioned for us to just go sit down.  

Minutes later, who boards the bus with us?  Yes. That’s correct:  An Italian police officer checking for tickets. 

And we didn’t have any, because the stinking machine was broken. 

The officer was questioning us about it (in Italian/Spanish)  and we were trying to explain (in Spanish/English) but the conversation was not going in our favor.  He was just about to write us tickets when Dana managed to convince him to ask the driver.  After a conversation (in Italian) with the driver the officer helped us work the machine, found out it wasn’t working properly and let us off the hook.  Thank goodness. 

At this point, we had apparently missed our stop, and the driver pulled over and kicked us out because we were at the end of the loop.  We were on a sidewalk, with no idea where we were…in a city where we didn’t speak the language.  Perfect. 

We managed to come across a couple of Italian girls, who we showed the address to our hotel.  They only spoke Italian, but they were angels.  Complete angels.  They walked us all the way to our hotel just so we wouldn’t get lost again.  If I had an award to give to the nicest person on the planet, it would probably definitely go to them. 

The next day, we decided we weren’t going to chance our luck with the bus machine again, and prebought the tickets.  When the bus pulled up, who was driving?  That’s right.  Same guy.   He opened the door, saw us, we showed him our tickets, then he promptly smiled shut the door and drove away. 

I can’t particularly say that I blame him.

BUT we found another bus driver and made it successfully through the rest of Italy without any further run-ins with the law.  Thank goodness.